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    A Study Guide for Natasha Trethewey's "Flounder"
    A Study Guide for Natasha Trethewey's "Flounder"
    A Study Guide for Natasha Trethewey's "Flounder"
    Ebook32 pages21 minutes

    A Study Guide for Natasha Trethewey's "Flounder"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Natasha Trethewey's "Flounder," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535823401
    A Study Guide for Natasha Trethewey's "Flounder"

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      A Study Guide for Natasha Trethewey's "Flounder" - Gale

      11

      Flounder

      Natasha Trethewey

      1993

      Introduction

      Natasha Trethewey's Flounder was first published in 1993 in the academic journal Callaloo; however, it did not receive much critical attention until its publication seven years later in Trethewey's first book of poems, Domestic Work. Many critics have praised the poems in Domestic Work for their originality and seeming effortlessness. Flounder, like many of Trethewey's poems, portrays a figure from Trethewey's life. In this case, the figure depicted is Aunt Sugar, the sister of Trethewey's maternal grandmother. Because of the interaction between the speaker of the poem and the Aunt Sugar character, and because both Trethewey and the speaker of poem are biracial, it is reasonable to infer that the speaker in Flounder may represent some past incarnation of Trethewey herself.

      Trethewey's being half black and half white is a situation that is directly confronted in Flounder. Just as the half-black, half-white fish struggles to breathe above water, so too the biracial speaker of the poem struggles with her identity. In this way, the flounder in the poem symbolizes the speaker. The poem's title, Flounder, refers not only to the fish in the poem but also to the struggles depicted in the work, as the word flounder means to struggle. Interestingly, Trethewey combines both traditional and more contemporary stylistic elements in Flounder; for example, it includes several traditional ballad stanzas written in African American vernacular English.

      A copy of the poem Flounder can be found in Natasha Trethewey's collection Domestic Work, published in 2000 by Graywolf Press.

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